Banks outsource product design to focus on sales

Private banks are increasingly leaving the costly engineering of complex financial products to others, while they put greater effort into advising and selling to their wealthy clients, industry experts say.
A growing chunk of investment products sold by wealth managers is from third-party financial engineers, a trend that is likely to become stronger as their clientele becomes financially more savvy.
"It is a huge trend. It is irreversible. Private banks are definitely dramatically moving in that direction," said Ray Soudah, the head of Millennium Associates, a merger and acquisition advisory firm. The rising popularity of hedge funds has furthered the outsourcing of product design - banks call it open architecture - as clients have started to see the high returns promised by the alternative investment world, Soudah also said.
Citigroup, for example, swapped its asset management business for money manager Legg Mason Inc's brokerage last year, saying the move enabled it to be more independent in offering its clients a wider range of products.
"Clients want you to help them increase their wealth, which is not necessarily done with your own products. So you may have to advise them of good products for which you go outside," Citigroup's Veit Schuhen told Reuters.
"It's a move into asset gathering rather than pure production," said Schuhen, the head of Citigroup's private banking unit in Switzerland, adding that the profile of wealthy clients was changing rapidly.
Millionaires no longer tend to be the complacent heirs to long-kept family treasures but more often are entrepreneurs who made a quick fortune with their businesses, are better versed in financial matters and are willing to take more risk, he said. Merrill Lynch, the world's third-largest wealth manager, announced in February it would sell its asset management arm to BlackRock Inc in another example of a move away from the in-house production of products.
And at EFG, a rapidly growing Swiss wealth manager, a full 85 percent of client assets in funds are invested in third-party products. Clients can opt for EFG's own funds, it says, but others often offer better products.
Small developers of financial products, meanwhile, are thriving as they specialise in sophisticated areas such as hedge funds or private equity and sell their products to banks.
"For us it's not distribution which is key. For us it's understanding products and understanding clients. We've built our name on understanding hedge funds," said Hans-Joerg Baumann, chief executive of the Swiss Capital Group.